I observed her closely under that big square dome of light. Funny. I’d always thought of Bennie as young, just, well, younger than anyone I was used to being friends with, anyway. But in that moment and in that light, when I could really see her eyes, I realized I’d never think of her that way again.
Her eyes were a rich brown that made me imagine, well, I don’t know really, they were just full and vibrant, and her ponytail flowed like honey over her shoulder. I wondered if she always wore it up like that or only for class and rotations. I wondered how long it really was when it was down.
I realized that after all these months of class together, I didn’t really know her, and I wanted to, because she was smart, she was competent in class, and…she looked like she needed to talk. Maybe I could listen.
I spoke with that impulse. “Hey, Bennie, wanna grab a beer or something when you’re done?”
She jumped slightly. “Oh. Where you thinking of going?” Her hair shifted as she finally turned those eyes on me.
“Not far—a little dive off of Sand Lane.” I named the spot where the only gay bar on the Island was. I hadn’t been there in a while, but if I was going to hang out, I wanted to be comfortable. “It’s light, it’ll be quiet, and we can grab a beer.”
Something about her face made me think I’d read her wrong, and maybe I’d been misunderstood. This wasn’t a come-on; it was just chat, that was all, chat and a beer.
“No one’ll bother you,” I told her. “It’s midweek. It’ll probably be pretty dead.”
She smiled at me, a real smile finally, and I was surprised at how different it made her seem.
“Nah, I wasn’t, I mean, I know the place. I wasn’t worried about that,” she said. “I just, well…I’m a little light this week and I gotta grab the bus.”
I understood, I truly did. But still, that late at night? It wasn’t really safe and I had a car—I’d drive her.
“Whattaya say I stand you for the beer and you get it next time?” I offered super casually, “and I’ll give you a ride home?” I understood her pride. I had it too, and I didn’t want to offend her.
I watched as Bennie considered.
“Fine,” she nodded and agreed. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I asked with a teasing grin, trying to catch her eyes with mine.
“Yeah. Okay.” She smiled again. “Meet you back here in two hours?”
“Sure,” I said, “no problem.”
I checked my watch. It had been about ten minutes. “I’ll see you later, then. I should get back inside.”
“Later, Scotty.” Bennie waved, and I walked back into the emergency room.
I met Trace by the nurses’ station and followed her to the main cafeteria, which was empty except for the clerk behind the counter who doubled as a register person.
“It’s not cappuccino, but it’ll do for now,” Trace said as we walked to an empty table.
“That’s fine.” I pulled out a chair and looked around me as I sat—Trace had picked a corner where the windows met, and here on the third floor, we had an excellent view of the ambulance entrance to the ER. The letters that spelled “emergency” glowed a dull red in the dark. I sipped at my coffee as I contemplated the sign, the shadows it cast, the word itself until it seemed to float apart into separate letters with no connection to each other.
“So…how’s it going so far?” Trace’s voice, a smooth burr, broke the silence.
I smiled in reflex when I saw her watching me with an expression I would come to know as a mix of humor and concern: it made the gray of her eyes darken.
“Well…” I took another sip, then launched into a recap of the events so far—from the boy with the bit of chicken cartilage stuck in his nose to Mr. Wheeler’s last sock change.
Trace’s nostrils flared slightly at that terminal tale. “She told you to do what?” And even though I’d just met her, it was obvious she was upset.
“She told me to take his vitals. Should I have?” I asked, confused. Maybe that really was a protocol for the ER, make sure the obviously dead guy was really dead—but didn’t they have machines to do that?
Trace shook her head. “That…was a bad call on someone’s part,” she said finally, her mouth a straight line. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to be eased into this scene, not dropped head first into the whole mess.”
“Ah…don’t worry about it,” I said, and grinned at her, because I recognized the element of care for me in that statement, “it had to happen sometime.” We chatted a while longer and somehow, eventually, the conversation turned to what we both knew it would sooner or later: sex.
“I’m just talking sex—healthy, consenting adult sex—no strings,” she said with a lifted brow and a very sensual twist to her lips.
“We don’t know each other well enough for that,” I said with a smile. She hadn’t come on but had made a blatant declaration, and while I was definitely interested, I wasn’t sure how to handle her—most women were a bit more coy, and I enjoyed that, the flirting, the teasing, the verbal foreplay, the game.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t have sex with Trace; it wasn’t that at all. But I had just come out of living with someone, and while that wasn’t what Trace was asking, I wasn’t sure I wanted no-strings sex either. Then again, it was worth considering.
“I’m sure we could learn each other well enough, don’t you think?” She let her gaze travel down my face to rest pointedly on my throat.
I could feel the pulse jump in my neck—she really knew how to play this game.
“But first,” I took a sip from my mug, “are the preliminaries, you know.” If we were playing, I wanted to up the ante, build the anticipation just that much more. I didn’t plan to bed this woman this night, but I wanted to make sure she remembered me, because I probably would the next time.
Her hand lay on the table and I laid mine over it, running my thumb along its edge. “Victoria Scotts,” I said quietly as I felt that smooth skin under mine, “and I’m very glad to meet you.”
Trace exhaled softly as my hand touched hers and didn’t pull away as she observed them. “Named and claimed, is that the deal?” she asked as her cool dark gray eyes met mine.
“Maybe.”
I watched as she thought about my offer, then finally turned her hand under mine until she grasped it. “Trace…Tracy Elizabeth Cayden,” she said finally, “and I’m very glad to meet you as well.”
As I shook her hand again, I glanced at my watch. My time was up and I had to get back to the emergency room.
“Thanks for the coffee. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow—I’m doing ambulance rotations.”
“You just might,” she responded. “Tomorrow’s an odd-numbered day and we’re designated trauma. I’m on the crash team.”
“I remember.” I grinned. “But if it’s a quiet night…”
“Page me in respiratory when you’re done if you’d like,” she finished for me.
“Will do.” I stood to leave. She might not have known, but I planned on it.
The last hour of my rotation went quietly, and I spent most of it taking vital signs and writing them down on the various patient charts. I checked my watch: three minutes to go, three minutes until my rotation was done, three minutes until I met Bennie for a beer so we could compare notes.
“So…rough night?” I asked after we ordered our beers and found an even quieter spot in the nearly empty bar.
Bennie took a long pull from the glass bottle in her hand before answering. “Yeah,” she said finally, then stared at the ground a moment, “yeah, it really was. You?”
I sipped at my beer and thought about it. “Mostly I was scared that I’d fuck it up, you know? I was afraid I’d forget shit, or that my brain would freeze up or something like that, at a critical point, but I mostly took vital signs—well, except for Mr. Wheeler and that drunk driver—” I shut up right there.
Even in the dim light, Bennie seemed green. I let the silence stretch, unwilling to push in any direction, just letting it flow however it wanted to or needed to.
“I was scared too,” Bennie said in a half whisper, “and I was really afraid I’d forget everything. Man, Tori!” Bennie exclaimed. “He was almost fucking dead when we got there, and for what, you know? For what?”
Considering the damage that one earlier drunken driver had caused with that MCI MVA, I didn’t know either, and we were both careful as we finished our beers to make sure there wouldn’t be another idiot on the road before I drove her home.
*
When I showed up for my ambulance rotation the next night and once again presented myself to the nurses’ station, Debbie and I were old friends.
“Hey, Scotty!” She waved as I neared.
“’lo, Debbie.” I waved back. “What’s in store for me today?”
She gave me a big smile. “You’re riding with Tigger and Trevor—the terrible twosome of the trauma trade.” She said that last part in her best game-show voice.
“Okay,” I drawled affably. This was going to be one hell of an adventure, I was sure—if I didn’t screw it up.
Some of my anxiety must have reflected on my face, because Debbie tapped my arm. “You’ll be fine, and you’ll be with two of the best guys on the road—you couldn’t ride with better,” she assured me. “Come on, I’ll take you outside to meet them.”
All I could do was bob my head in agreement because here it came, the moment I’d
really
been waiting for as I stepped on the same tiles I’d walked over the night before on my way to the ambulance bay.
Through the glass doors I could see the backs of two ambulances and four uniformed figures chatting in a corner.
“Oh, here.” Debbie stopped at the locker just inside the passageway. “Give me your jacket,” she told me as she unlocked the door and reached inside. “Grab your wallet, and put this on instead.”
She handed me the standard uniform jacket the hospital personnel wore, and I goggled at it.
“Don’t want you to stick out, do we?” She grinned as she adjusted my collar.
“Uh…I guess not?” I hazarded, still struck dumb. I patted my chest to make sure my wallet was in place, then readjusted my gear belt across my hips so I could reach everything: holster with tools on the right so I could grab them easily, pocket mask just behind my left hip. I shifted the jacket once more so it fell comfortably.
“Let’s introduce you to the guys.” Debbie clapped me on the shoulder and we walked through the sliding door.
After I met Tigger and Trevor, they took me through the “one hundred”—the checklist of items the state required onboard, the items the city required, and the items the hospital required. This particular hospital was a “voluntary hospital”; they voluntarily linked to the 911 system by contract and agreement.
“Okay,” Trevor said when they were done, “let’s get started. You get to sit in the jump seat.” He pointed at the seat that faced the head of the stretcher.
They hopped into the front cab, Tigger started the engine, and we pulled out slowly as the radio crackled to life.
“Five-five Eddy, what’s your current status? Over.”
Trevor grabbed the mic. “This is five-five Eddy, currently one hundred and en route to our cee-oh-are, over,” he said crisply as we pulled out onto the main street.
“Redirect five-five Eddy. Respond to…” The voice continued, giving a street location and the reported patient condition, which Trevor wrote down as Tigger turned the rig around.
“Hold on back there!” he advised, then flipped the lights and sirens on.
My blood pounded in my head. Where were we going? What would we find when we got there? What was—
“Hey, Tigger?” I called from the back over the din of the siren.
“Yeah?”
“What’s a cee-oh-are?” I asked as we sped through the streets.
“C, O, R,” he yelled over from the front, “stands for ‘center of rove.’ It’s the actual cross street in the middle of the area we respond to.”
“Oh. Thanks,” I yelled back, adding that information to my mental file.
The first call was a fifteen-year-old male in a playground who’d severely twisted his ankle, if not broken it.
His friends clustered around him, and as I took the first set of vitals, Tigger quickly examined his leg and foot.
“That sneaker’s got to come off,” he said, shaking his head.
“I can’t pull it off,” the boy said, his words catching as he spoke. He had to be in pain, because the visible skin above the sneaker had already turned a reddish purple and was terribly swollen.
“I’m sorry, guy, but,” and Trevor put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, “we’ve got to cut your sneaker.”
“But…but…” he spluttered, and Tigger sent me to the back of the rig to pull out splints while they handled the distraught patient. Trevor not only insisted I apply them, which was very cool, but he also had me present the patient when we got to the ER.
Once we transferred the patient off our stretcher, we cleaned the mattress pad and set it up with new sheets. I learned very quickly that this was SOP (standard operating procedure).
Next we responded to an MVA on a side street: a driver had run his car through a stop sign and T-boned another vehicle.
“This,” Trevor yelled over the siren as we drove, “is what we refer to as an Allstate call.”
“Why?” My throat was getting tight from talking over the sirens.